It was a dark era in U.S. history. The homeland was rife with protests. The communist Soviet Union was threatening nuclear action. Israel was at war with Egypt and Syria. And in Asia scores of young Americans were dying in the bloody stained jungles of Vietnam.

To build its searchable database Wikileaks combed through 1.7 million declassified PDF files, which totaled over 380 gigabytes of data and 700 million words. The records were released via a declassification/publication process, that's supposed to occur within 25 years of their publication, according to U.S. State Department policy.

The publication process of State Department cables is initiated by the State Department declassifications and releases. The cables are then passed off to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for final review.

II. Documents for 1976-1988 are Behind Schedule

The leaks site points out that the cables for 1976 through 1988 should be out, but that the release is 12 years "behind schedule." But Wikileaks cites a 2006 review by US National Security Archives, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University, which suggests the delay was not entirely accidental. The review found that the Bush administration had reclassified 55,000 releasable pages. And reportedly, that process has been ongoing under President Obama's regime in the years since the review.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange jabs, "The [Kissinger Cables] collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published. The US administration cannot be trusted to maintain the history of its interactions with the world. Fortunately, an organisation with an unbroken record in resisting censorship attempts now has a copy."

Julian Assange has accused the U.S. government and global media of a grand conspiracy.
[Getty Images/AFP]

An important on-going question is whether Wikileaks -- which claims it needs tens of millions of dollars yearly to stay online -- is acting as a true whistleblowing site (which typically only publishes incriminating evidence, not sensitive, but immaterial operational details) or as a foreign espionage organization. That question is unlikely to be resolved any time soon, though, as site founder Julian Assange explicitly refused multiple requests from reporters to identify whether any nation states fund his site or funding levels by nation.

lol you call them terrorist without actually even giving them a trial... the world addressed this problem long ago it's called giving them a fair trial and sentence them according to their crimes, I don't see any difference between a criminal that kills dozens of civilians and a terrorist that does the same, sure the terrorist may be part of an organization but so does the criminal, besides terrorism is not a new trend it has been around since the dawn of times.

Funny you speak of the Geneva Convention cause the US nitpicked what he want and never agreed with the complete extent of it...

Cause holding people with no trial is not a violation of the human rights?

Criminals, and I assume you mean the domestic kind, in the US have certain rights as they are US citizens. Foreign combatants do not have those same rights. As POW's they fall under the Geneva Conventions. The general argument is that since they are not a uniformed combatant, and they do not represent any nation, who do we hold accountable that was a signatory of those conventions? In the reality of those conventions, it is a gentleman's agreement between the various nations when they go to war. The objective is that your troops would be returned once the war was over.